Portside

The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.

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Too much credit or not enough? The film highlighted the realities of what farmworkers experienced in the past and present. People who watched the film were brought to tears by episodic scenes of farmworkers, Filipino and Mexican, being terrorized by vigilantes. Cesar Chavez also illustrated the feudal rule of the agricultural industrial complex consisting of growers interlocked with the institutions of law enforcement, politics, agencies of the state, and finance.

In 1965, the year his father and 1,000 field laborers - the first wave of Filipinos to the United States, known as manongs - began the grape strike that set the stage for the boycott that would lead Cesar Chavez and thousands of farmworker families to create the nation's pioneering agricultural labor union, the United Farm Workers...On Sept. 8, 1965, Filipino farm workers organized by Mr.Itliong crowded into the Filipino Community Hall, where Filipino elders still gather